The first half of 2024 has been brutally hot, indicating the year is well on its way to becoming the hottest year on record. All six months of the year have broken temperature records and exceeded pre-industrial averages for 1850-1900 by 1.5 degrees Celsius or more, according to the latest update from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
While crossing the 1.5°C mark in individual months or years does not imply that the Paris Agreement’s average global temperature threshold of 1.5°C has been exceeded, repeated crossings do bring the planet closer to that critical barrier.
Such high average global temperatures also bring with them a slew of extreme weather events seen around the world in the form of heatwaves, droughts, floods and tropical cyclones, as well as impetus for slow-onset processes such as sea-ice melting and sea level rise.
The most recent month to break the record was June, when the average surface air temperature was 16.66°C, according to C3S. The month was warmer than the pre-industrial average by 1.5°C and 0.67°C warmer than the average global June temperature between 1991-2020.
The record for the warmest June had broken just last year but the current month was warmer than the previous record by 0.14°C.
June, which has broken its record twice in two years, has become the 13th consecutive warmest month in history. A similar streak of monthly warming records had been broken in 2015-2016.
But what is different is the magnitude of the warming observed in 2023-2024. June is the 12th consecutive month with temperatures above the pre-industrial average by 1.5°C or more.
Between July 2023 and June 2024, the average global temperature was 1.64°C higher than the pre-industrial average and 0.76°C higher than the 1991-2020 average, both of which were records.
The average warming in Europe in June was 1.57°C higher than the average from 1991 to 2020, making it the continent’s second hottest June. The warmest parts of Europe were in the southeast and in Turkey.
Warmer-than-normal temperatures were also recorded in eastern Canada, the western United States, western Mexico, Brazil, Northern Siberia, West Asia, northern Africa and western Antarctica.
Western parts of the United States are currently experiencing extreme heat wave conditions, which may last for the next few days. On July 7, Las Vegas recorded its highest temperature of 47.8°C.
The warming in Antarctica, combined with other weather conditions, resulted in sea-ice extent being 12 per cent below average, the second lowest June average after 16 per cent in 2023.
The high temperatures were also accompanied by floods in many regions in June. In Europe, more than average rain fell in Iceland, central and most of southwestern regions. This led to floods in Germany, Italy, France and Switzerland.
The floods in Switzerland, mostly in the form of flash floods, occurred even in some remote areas of the Alps, according to media reports.
Wetter-than-average conditions were also observed in parts of North America, southwestern and southeastern Asia, the southernmost parts of Africa and numerous regions of Australia and South America.
Drier-than-normal conditions were also experienced in parts of North America, Asia and South America. Eastern Europe, particularly around the Black Sea, as well as parts of Ireland, the United Kingdom and southern Italy, experienced drier-than-normal conditions.
June also brought bad news for the world’’s oceans, which have been boiling for the past 15 months consecutively, now fueling record-breaking tropical cyclones like hurricane Beryl in the North Atlantic Ocean.
The average sea-surface temperature (SST) for all ocean basins between 60°S and 60°N was 20.85°C, the highest of the month. This was the fifteenth consecutive month of record-breaking SSTs.
“June marks the 13th consecutive month of record-breaking global temperatures and the 12th in a row above 1.5°C with respect to pre-industrial. This is more than a statistical oddity and it highlights a large and continuing shift in our climate,” Carlo Buontempo, director of C3S, said in a statement.
Even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm. This is inevitable, unless we stop adding GHG into the atmosphere and the oceans, Buontempo further stated.
“There is an approximately 95 per cent chance that 2024 beats 2023 to be the warmest year since global surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with the Berkeley Earth climate monitoring group and private company, Stripes, posted on the social media platform X.